Thursday, 21 February 2013

and other storiesProlificacy's name is Steven Wilson, as you might agree when you've seen the man's 500-page discog here.

Each new Steven Wilson album release is a bigger, fuller, more satisfying art-event than its predecessor. I'm talking of course about the limited deluxe editions. Nothing else is worth having, if you can have instead one of these wondrous objects, while nothing else - no mere collection of tunes and songs - is in our time, worth our time reviewing. Obviously then, it's especially edifying when - reportedly to beat an internet leak - your preorder arrives, entirely unexpectedly, four days early.

Rivaling the dimensions and heft of some paving slabs, well the 10" ones anyway, these special editions seem to have evolved by a process of continuous improvement into a format which by now should make the fan relax immediately into the familiar luxurious form, simultaneously with the unfailingly new and truly multimedia content. It's like a lottery win of the senses. For consider:

First, it looks and feels great - a solidly substantial objet d'art, with its great 5mm thick hardbound book cover enveloping 128 heavy and glossy illustrated pages full of impressions, stories, lyrics, sleeve notes, mysteries. Next, you get the smell of it, obviously the high aromas of a newly printed, full gloss inky tome. Only at the end of these sensory introductions, and as a final formality, will you eventually get to hear it. Before then, this beautiful thing has already carved its little square snug into your world, and as you begin your first consumption of these sounds (2 CDs) and visions (a DVD and a Blu-Ray), you reflect that Steven could easily have achieved a full sweep of all five senses, by the simple expedient of including a stick of chewing gum. Maybe next time.The Musicians

Every work of this standard of quality, and each major aspect of such a work, is essentially in itself a collaboration. The original and most vital aspect here being of course the music, that collaboration comprises primarily Steven himself, singing and playing various keyboards (including King Crimson's original mellotron, borrowed from his friend Robert Fripp) and guitars, as befits a solo album. Thence in the astonishing ensemble of legends that is his touring band, alphabetically we have Nick Beggs on bass, Chapman Stick and vocals; Guthrie Govan on lead guitar, and Adam Holzman on keyboards; while Marco Minnemann* hits stuff, and Theo Travis blows into things.

The album comprises six pieces, with three of these - satisfyingly enough, for those with an adult's attention span - each being over 10 minutes long. It opens with a song previously released on Steven's earlier live document, the quite recent Get All You Deserve 2CD / DVD / Blu-Ray.

1.Luminol: an uptempo percussive 4-to-the-floor with driving bass, signals the initial intent. Transitioned by Theo's flute and harmony vox / mellotron, it falls and fragments into a typically prog clipped and snipped timesig, before slowing and softening into the story of the busker (one of Steven's ghost stories), with yet more lush harmonies. There are hints of and nods to a shared progressive jazz heritage throughout, culminating in a typically strong KC and mellotron restart and return to quick tempo for the finish. From Wikipedia:

"Luminol", which was first performed by Steven Wilson and his band on the second half of his Grace for Drowning tour, takes its inspiration from a busker, who, according to Wilson, is "there every single day. It doesn’t matter what the weather is like; he’s always there, playing his acoustic guitar and singing these songs. Snow, rain, gale force wind – nothing will stop him from being in his spot. ... He’s the kind of guy who is so set in his routine that even death wouldn’t stop him." Wilson considers the notion "that somebody could be a ghost in life, as well as a ghost in death, somebody who’s completely ignored even in their lifetime – it hardly makes a difference; and death doesn’t make a difference, either; it doesn’t break the routine." [1]

2.Drive Home is soft and gently acoustic, showcasing Steven's famous talent for hook laden tune smithery. You need to clear away all the jetsam in your brain and face the truth. Even this gentility itself takes a percussion break, a breather wherein for example a delicate guitar part ambles alone for a few bars. Builds to a mixed (both climactic and anticlimactic) finish.

"Drive Home" is based on a suggestion from illustrator Hajo Mueller. It is "about a couple driving along in a car at night, very much in love; the guy is driving, and his partner – his wife or girlfriend or whoever she is – is in the passenger seat, and the next minute she’s gone." The ghost of the man's partner eventually returns, "saying, ‘I’m going to remind you now what happened that night.’ There was a terrible car accident, and she died, etcetera, etcetera – again, the idea of trauma leading to a missing part of this guy’s life. He can’t deal with the reality of what happened, so he blocks it out – like taking a piece of tape and editing a big chunk out of it." [2]

3.The Holy Drinker indulges a sequence of guitar / keyboard / clarinet solos as well as some welcome overdrumming in its satisfyingly extended (2½ minute) 4/4 introduction, prior to leading into another SW ballad, whose verses are similarly separated by inventive instrumental fills. The middle duet between Fender Rhodes and flute, leading into some big Keith Emerson chops, is particularly worth the ticket price. When the story continues in a lente pianissimo section, its dramatic and mathematical conclusion can be sensed from afar.

According to Wilson, "The Holy Drinker" concerns "a guy who’s very pious, very religious, preachy and self-righteous. I’m thinking of TV evangelist-types – guys who are prepared to tell people that they’re living their lives wrong and that they’re missing something because they don’t believe in God or whatever it is." The man, who, despite criticising other people's lifestyles, is himself an alcoholic, unwittingly challenges the Devil to a drinking competition, with disastrous consequences: "Of course, you can’t beat the Devil at a drinking competition – you can’t beat the Devil at anything – and so he loses. ... He gets dragged to Hell." [3]

4. Vocally, The Pin Drop starts unpromisingly. But instrumentally, this is a consistently strong and driving track, with particularly tortured sax.

"The Pin Drop" addresses "the concept that you can be with someone because it’s comfortable and convenient, not because there’s any love or empathy." Wilson explains that "The song is basically sung by the wife. She’s dead, she’s been thrown in the river by the husband, and she’s floating down in the river while singing this song – from beyond death, beyond the grave, as it were." The song considers "The idea... that sometimes in a relationship there can be so much tension, so much unspoken resentment and hatred, that the tiniest thing can set off a violent episode, and in this case, one that ends in tragedy. The sound of a pin dropping on a floor can be the thing that instigates the fury." [4]

5. Back now in time and context to Foxtrot era Genesis, for the introduction to the little proggy masterpiece that is The Watchmaker. Not a love song, but a tale of touching companionship and failure, human existence, inevitability and frailty. Its second act warms and beats to the musical imagery of clockwork, accelerating subjectively through a spectacular clarinet and guitar duet, before a braking return to the piano-backed, heart-rendingly honest narrative. The endgame, by turns instrumental and vocal, is a particularly pleasing and quirky workout.

The fifth track on the album explores "the story of the watchmaker, the guy who is meticulous about his craft, but he never has any kind of emotional outburst, nor does he express violence or any extreme emotions whatsoever." It concerns "a couple who have been together for 50 years or more, purely because it was convenient and comfortable." Wilson explains that "The watchmaker ends up killing his wife and burying her under the floorboards of his workshop. But, of course, she comes back, because she’s been with him for 50 years; she’s not going to leave him now." The song concludes when "the wife comes back to take him with her, which", Wilson suggests, "is another classic ghost story, in a way." [5]

6. As for the closing, title track: The Raven that Refused to Sing is perhaps the most chillingly haunting ballad on this quite haunty album.

The title track explores the story of "an old man at the end of his life who is waiting to die. He thinks back to a time in his childhood when he was incredibly close to his older sister. She was everything to him, and he was everything to her. Unfortunately, she died when they were both very young." The man becomes convinced that a raven, who visits the man's garden, is something of "a symbol or a manifestation of his sister. The thing is, his sister would sing to him whenever he was afraid or insecure, and it was a calming influence on him. In his ignorance, he decides that if he can get the raven to sing to him, it will be the final proof that this is, in fact, his sister who has come back to take him with her to the next life." [6]

See and hear for yourself:

The six indented comments above, quoted from Wikipedia, are in fact primarily sourced from a particularly illuminating interview with Steven (appearing two weeks ago in musicradar) in which he talks about the initial development of the project, and discusses the background to each song in turn and in generous detail.

The Bonuses

The second CD contains different versions of all of the main songs, curiously labelled "(demo)" - who on earth would demand a demo from an effective supergroup** like this? - together with one "unused idea", Clock Song. Were the pendulum percussion and the musical chimes regarded as too obvious, too Mellotron Scratch? Maybe it just couldn't be bent to inhabit the overarching and otherwise cohesive supernatural / ghost story / fear of mortality / end-of-life regret concept circle of the piece. Whatever the reason, it is indeed little more than a not-fully-developed idea, inessential, though not unpleasant.

The documentary DVD and Blu-Ray (see below) also contain between them:

and as you would expect from the progressive world's most prolific 5.1 remastereer, the following 5.1 mixes:

DTS 96/24 5.1 surround

Dolby AC3 5.1 surround

96/24 5.1 LPCM

DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

YMMV

One reviewer, while describing this new album as painful, moving, desperate, melancholic and superbly beautiful and exhorting us to Buy it, also advises, It’s pretty much a progressive affair. As simple as that. There is nothing here that manages to stretch itself out of the canons of such a well-defined genre. And he may be right; but many long-time fans of Steven Wilson (and of Porcupine Tree in particular) are impressed by the jazz sensibility and free-form styling that have infected his recent work - perhaps inevitably, given the creative cadre of influences here, and his own experiences in remastering those King Crimson, Jethro Tull et al masterpieces for surround audio. To those fans, this kind of prog is new and fresh today, forever heading off in unexpected directions.

The Stories and their Art - Hajo Mueller

While Steven himself provides the quite literally haunting stories for Luminol and The Birthday Party, collaborator Hajo Mueller supplies the concept and illustrations throughout the book, as well as the original idea for the title story which he then reworked with Steven. Both the DVD and the Blu-Ray include his art gallery.

Photography & Documentary - Lasse Hoile

It wouldn't be a new Steven Wilson opus without that final contribution from his long and fruitful collaboration with Lasse Hoile, who here provides for both the DVD and the Blu-Ray, the photographs used in the photo gallery, as well as filming and editing the indispensable studio documentary.

* Zappa alumnus supreme Chad Wackerman(Best Drummer Name Ever!) stands in for Marco Minnemann on the North and South American legs of the current tour.** Actually, each member leads his own band. Hypergroup, then?

Thursday, 14 February 2013

The previous article on Role Based Access Control described the IIdentity and IPrincipal implementations available with Microsoft .NET 1.0 through 4.0. Designed in 2002, these soon began to creak under the stress of increasingly distributed systems of rising complexity. With WCF in 2006, Microsoft provided another security model incompatible with the old one, and in 2009, succeeded in combining the best parts of these two implementations into WIF, and ultimately in 2012, into .NET 4.5.

IIdentity and IPrincipal Revisited

The new hotness was Claims Based Authorization. A System.Security.Claim is a statement about an entity, made by another entity known as the Issuer of the claim. The statement takes the form of a key/value pair, which is obviously much more powerful than the true/false settings used in Role Based. For example, Active Directory might issue claims that the current user is named "alice", is an administrator, has email address "alice@microsoft.com", and so on. We would treat these claims, coming from AD, with a high level of confidence.

However, recall that previously we found reasons (of localization and breaking admin changes) to avoid using literal labels to identify security resources such as groups. It turns out that we might also want to use the predefined members - essentially namespace URIs - of the ClaimTypes class, to ensure that our claims can be serialized, shared and understood across a federated identity space:

Obviously, claims can carry a lot more detailed information about an entity than roles. For excellent reasons of backward compatibility, claims were integrated into the existing IIdentity / IPrincipal framework through the creation of two new container classes:

The second parameter to the ClaimsIdentity constructor, authenticationType, is needed because, unlike the case with Role Based Identity, Claims Based Identity allows claims to be attached to e.g. anonymous principals. By default then, if authenticationType is not provided, IsAuthenticated will return false.

Backward Compatibility

Examining the framework source, it's interesting to note that every (non static) public in these new classes is virtual. That's because they have been "interposed" in .NET 4.5, so that all the implementation classes we looked at last time (WindowsIdentity / WindowsPrincipal, and GenericIdentity / GenericPrincipal) as well as those we didn't (e.g. FormsIdentity, RolePrincipal) are now derived from these common base classes. This design gives all consumer code access to the claims collection if desired, while still preserving the old interfaces (Name, IsInRole, etc).

The base classes implement the legacy security model with the help of the claims collection. For example, accessing the ClaimsIdentity.Name property causes this collection to be traversed, searching for an entry with type ClaimTypes.Name, while checking for a role is done by searching for ClaimTypes.Role entries.

Incidentally, both of these associations can be overridden using the supplied, overloaded, ClaimsIdentity constructors. So you can use these base classes to benefit from the power of the claims approach in your own custom implementation, while still retaining the flexibility of selecting which ClaimsType values you want the legacy support to treat as names and roles:

In the above example, accessing the Name property will search for a claim of type Email (often used as the unique user identifier), while a call to IsInRole will search for a match within the groups to which the user belongs.

Consuming the Principal

To get access to the claims from runtime code, we simply retrieve the IPrincipal from the thread as before, and cast it to a ClaimsPrincipal. Alternatively, and equivalently, we can obtain it in a single step via the handy, static ClaimsPrincipal.Current property:

var user = ClaimsPrincipal.Current;

With this we can now run arbitrary LINQ queries on the Claims collection property, or take advantage of the special FindFirst, FindAll and HasClaim methods, all of which accept either string parameters or lambdas.

Incoming credentials arrive, are processed and transformed, and then delivered to your application in the "final" ClaimsPrincipal. This processing begins with an appropriate SecurityTokenHandler deserializing and validating the incoming token, from which it constructs the "initial" ClaimsPrincipal. This can then be further processed or transformed, for example to validate the incoming claims or translate security-domain groups into application-domain user permissions, via your custom ClaimsAuthenticationManager (to run the following sample code, add references to System.IdentityModel and System.Security):

Obviously we have to find somewhere to tell the system to use our new custom ClaimsAuthenticationManager class, and the equally obvious place to do that is in the configuration file. There's a new "system.identityModel" section:

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

This introduction to aspects of Identity and Access Control in Microsoft .NET 1.0 through 4.0 serves as groundwork for examination, in a later article, of the same issues in .NET 4.5. We start with two short interface declarations:

IIdentity and IPrincipal

These two interfaces first appeared in 2002, with the initial release of .NET 1.0 (and ASP.NET 1.0):

For developers these interfaces abstract, and their implementing classes encapsulate, the most important features of identity-related concerns. IIdentity deals only with authentication: Name obviously identifies the user; AuthenticationType describes how that user became authenticated (e.g. via Windows Authentication or Kerberos, or some other custom mechanism); and IsAuthenticated indicates whether the user is actually authenticated at all (client-server apps sometimes allow anonymous users). IPrincipal extends this provision into the adjacent realm of authorization, by providing the single method IsInRole allowing the aggregated IIdentity to be interrogated at the first level of role-based access control granularity.

Thread.CurrentPrincipal

Not to be confused with the Win32 "thread token", this is a static property of the Thread class, giving access to the currently executing thread's IPrincipal implementation. So not strictly static then, as every thread in your system can have a different value of IPrincipal. More sort of thread-static. It is set up when the security context for a client is established, either by the startup code of a desktop app, or by some runtime in the case of an ASP.NET or WCF server app.

WindowsIdentity and WindowsPrincipal

When the AuthenticationType indicates Windows Authentication, these are the concrete System.Security.Principal classes used to wrap the Windows security token, encapsulating the Windows account of the current desktop app process (or of the client, in a client-server system):

Note that while this code works, it is not advisable to refer to user groups using strings. For one thing, the built-in group names are localized. For another, an administrator might change the name of a group, obviously breaking any hard-coded string based checks. For reasons like these, Windows internally uses not strings but immutable Security IDs (SIDs) to reference both users and groups:

Remove the Translate call to see the raw security IDs underlying your group names.

Returning to the earlier question about the interrogation of roles, we can now use the idea of a security identifier, together with the provided enumeration WellKnownSidType, to determine for example whether the current user is a local administrator:

The second parameter to the above SecurityIdentifier constructor is itself a SID. As suggested by its parameter name domainSid, domains also have security IDs, and can be passed around as such when required. For example, to determine whether the user is a domain administrator, you have to supply the SID of the relevant domain, which in this case is the user's account domain:

Ah, yes. Do remember when interpreting these results client side, that the returned values respect User Account Control (UAC), enabled by default since Windows Vista. UAC prefers to run client processes without administrative privileges, unless instructed otherwise (e.g. by Run as Administrator).

GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal

So much for the WindowsIdentity and WindowsPrincipal classes. These are ideal when your user list is stored in Windows itself, for example when you use Active Directory. But what if your user list is in some other repository, such as a SQL database?

Using the GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipalclasses, you can manage user names and roles for yourself, persisting them in your own custom credential store, while still taking advantage of those very useful IIdentity and IPrincipal properties - and specifically, the IsInRole method. Using System.Threading, we have (assuming that Alice has previously supplied a correct password, or otherwise authenticated):

This sets up the necessary principal for subsequent use. Later - say, during the execution of some other method on this thread - we might want to find out the current user name, and whether she is in Sales:

Whichever IIdentity and IPrincipal implementations we use, the mechanisms of role-based authorisation are the same. Here are four alternatives, from the imperative to the declarative, all of which resolve directly or eventually into IsInRole calls:

Notice that options 1-3 above all have the disadvantage that the security model is hard coded throughout the source. Obviously, this can be very hard to maintain. Also in option 3, there is no simple, convenient and tidy way to hide these security assertions from the CLR, for example to run unit tests. These objections and many others have been addressed by the claims-based security authorization model introduced in .NET 4.5, which is the subject of the next article in this series.

Is the mbv record for sale or is it just streaming?
— Errors (@Weareerrors) February 3, 2013

All I know about My Bloody Valentine is that they're Welsh and sound a bit like Linkin Park.
— Robert Florence (@robertflorence) February 3, 2013

Plainly, everyone who is anyone is either talking or joking, or both, about the biggest music news of the year to date, not directly involving David Bowie.
Namely, the new

My Bloody Valentine

album, m b v, whose quiet release (escape?) softly echoes that of Sir David's latest song.
Not too many reviews yet though.
Let's see, I'm on to my fifth listen now, should be able to start collecting impressions.
Why not read along while you listen to it on their official YouTube channel:

(Oh incidentally, Robert's joke is that MBV are always being confused with Bridgend's finest metallurgists, Bullet For My Valentine.)

she found now

Solid Loveless territory.
I'm instantly reminded to turn up to 11 and blow my ears clear with a tin of Allsops Airduster for the full effect.
Ah yes, there ya go, hello old friends.

only tomorrow

Unremittingly shoegazing, with beautiful vocals, angelic in places.
Well, in one place really: the end of each verse.
And sporadically between verses.
Two places, then.
Nicely melodic guitar fuzzes in the breaks.

who sees you

A dissonance repeatedly reaching out, almost too slowly, too falteringly, and then only - just! - acquiring its goal on every turn.
We used to have to drill extra eccentric holes in our 45s to generate this kind of entertainment.
Like when you love chillies, and someone gives you picked jalapeños.
Not a home run, nor likely to grow on me.

A mad drum loop phased into sounding like traversing high speed trains.
Two-way multiply-echo-tracked vocals.
Well that was different, maybe one of their best.

That's Yer Nine

What did you think of it?
Here's what I thought.
A worthy, if imperfect and untimely, sequel to its two decades senior Loveless sibling.
This is the band's Majora's Mask to their Ocarina Of Time.
Bottom line: it has earned its place in the top 60GB that resides permanently in my phone.

Homage to Science Fiction's grandmasters.John And Linda's Big French AdventuresNotes from our 2010 & 2011 Brittany holidays.So Long PCW, and belatedly, Sub SetThanks for my (rewarding, but brief) writingcareer.Sony FB: Part One : Part TwoEvil Corporation in Bait And Switch!Wee MacThe story of our Border Collie (1993-2009).What's in a Gristleizer?Life as a solder jockey; recycling Golden Virginia tobacco tins.